The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 23, 2001 — In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract ("They were...
Essays
Aug 28, 2000 — Good Morning is the wildcard in Yasujiro Ozu’s career, the film that looks least like all his others, and one of the few where he sees the world through childrens’ eyes rather than those of an old man.For many years,...
Essays
May 15, 2000 — Horror movies take place in their own territory. The trick is to get us there. It doesn’t matter whether they start with fantastic premises and gothic settings, or with ordinary neighborhoods and daily experience, because the places and assumptions change...
Nov 1, 1999 — The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profoundly beguiling movie about sex, love, and rebellion.
Essays
Jun 5, 1995 — Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films into a world of acute realism with this bold critique of the position of women in contemporary Japanese society.
Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...
Sep 13, 1993 — If, as François Truffaut said, quoting Renoir back in 1958, “The film director’s task consists of getting pretty women to do pretty things,’” then never did he apply himself more faithfully than in Confidentially Yours specifically for Fanny Ardant, not...
Jun 24, 1990 — Some films have become famous simply because they’ve sold a lot of tickets. Others have major studio publicity machines behind them, the better to hog the spotlight. Still others earn their fame the hard way through genuine critical acclaim. But...